Monday, September 28, 2015

The Language of Donald Trump

Donald Trump Doesn't do oratory. If you want fine words, consider Carly Fiorina. You'd no more want to debate with Carly than you'd want to to engage in a spitting contest with a King Cobra. Unfortunately, she's stark staring mad. Putin: "I wouldn't talk to him." No. Just bomb the fucker, I guess.

Then there's Senator Rubio, so extraordinarily articulate, and like Carly, no time for that Commie, I mean fascist, New Hitler, Putin. If I were making a Hollywood blockbuster about the Cold War and a US President who took the world to the brink of nuclear extinction and over the edge, I'd want Rubio to play that president.

And there's JEB. Sure, he's no Lincoln, but for a Bush, boy, he talks a blue streak.

In comparison, Trump just doesn't cut it. Trump's sentences are rarely more than five or ten words:

Those are what, in the instructions to authors of some scholarly journals, you will find described as "short, declarative sentences." They're so simple that it's difficult even for an academic to conceal any lack of sense or substance. And short and declarative seems to be the only type of sentence Donald Trump knows. It ain't pretty, It don't amount to rhetoric, it won't win a debate, but it gets the message across: something you gotta do in business, and what you gotta do in an election if you want that half of the American electorate which has, by definition, an IQ below 100 to understand the message and be motivated to vote on it. For the mass of Americans, unemployed blue collar guys, unemployed black youth, university grads loaded with debt, earning minimum wage if they have a job at all, and still living at home in their late twenties, jobless single mothers raising a family on food stamps, voting for the Trump revolution not only seem like a good idea, it's an idea they can all understand.